2-year-old Elmont math prodigy 'Baby Dev' appearing on 'America's Got Talent'

A 2-year-old math prodigy from Elmont will be among the acts when NBC's variety competition “America’s Got Talent” returns for its 19th season Tuesday at 8 p.m. 

In TikTok videos that have garnered as many as 36 million views apiece, Devan Defreitas, known as Baby Dev, joyfully does mathematics equations — 14 x 12, anyone? — on dry-erase boards, sounding out each number as he does so. One video shows him flawlessly identifying Roman numerals.

Another has him solving word problems: “Mama gave Devan $30 and Dada gave Devan another $10. How much money does Devan have?” With no coaching, he writes “$30 + $10 = $40.” Where numbers are concerned, this pre-K kid could probably compete on “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?”

Dad Duane Defreitas says he still is processing all the attention coming his family’s way —including remote appearances on “CBS Mornings” with Gayle King and NBC’s “The Kelly Clarkson Show” — since the first video went up in September. “Sometimes I'm just kind of like, ‘Oh, it's nothing,’ ” Defreitas, 44, told Newsday. “But then it's like, ‘Wow, is this really happening?’ ”

Defreitas had never had a TikTok account, he said, “but you always hear about TikTok through friends or whatever. That's the thing these young kids are into nowadays. So I said, ‘Hey, why not make one for Devan and see what happens?’ ” The videos went viral and “not too long after that, the producers from AGT reached out to us.”

Defreitas, who also has an 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter in Mount Sinai “with my first two kids' mother,” asked that Devan’s mother not be named. But she was, he says, part of that day when they first glimpsed Devan’s instinct for math.

“He had a slight speech delay,” Defreitas said, “so he didn't say ‘Mama, Dada.’ And one day he was watching one of his number videos and they were singing the number-seven song, and he just blurred out, 'Seven! Seven!' ” as his first words. “And his mother and I just looked at each other with our eyes open and we actually caught that on video, too,” when he said it again.

Defreitas, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, played football at Flushing High School and later at Marist College in Poughkeepsie. He left that school to get an associate degree at Nassau Community College, he says, and afterward enrolled at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology. He left there to intern for a fashion company, and when the internship ended, rather than return to school he followed in his father Lincoln’s footsteps as an NYPD officer.

Beginning 2005, Defreitas served at Transit District 20 in Jamaica, Queens. He moved to Hempstead around 2010 and retired from the force in 2014 when “I tore my Achilles tendon while affecting an arrest, when somebody resisted arrest. … I heard a loud pop” and felt a pain “like bowling ball dropped from the sky and fell on my ankle.”

He says he still walks with a limp — “some days are better than others” — and with his retirement pension decided “I'm just going to spend time with my kids and raise my kids. And that's exactly what I do.” He moved to Bay Shore and then to Commack, before settling in Elmont in 2019 — keeping the Commack house to rent out on Airbnb and otherwise use as a second home.

There, Devan “hangs out in the pool. He loves to swim. And there are a lot of farms out there, and he loves animals.”

He also enjoyed being on AGT, his dad says. “He had never been on a stage so I was a little worried how he would react. But he loved the crowd. He loves being cheered on. He loves when we clap for them. So he soaked everything up and loved it.”